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The ebook edition of this title is Open Access and freely available to read online.
As Africa stands at the threshold of rapid global and technological change, Transforming Africa offers a timely, agenda-setting response to the urgent call for bold, future-oriented innovation across the continent.
This edited volume explores how African countries can reshape their innovation ecosystems to meet contemporary challenges and opportunities. It brings together diverse perspectives on emerging issues such as artificial intelligence, fintech, and smart agriculture, alongside critical socio-economic themes including food systems, health, education, culture, fashion, and peacebuilding. Transforming Africa is a call to action: to reimagine Africa’s innovation agenda with greater urgency, creativity, and contextual relevance. It highlights the rise of alternative paradigms and local approaches to innovation that challenge dominant models and offer more inclusive and sustainable pathways forward.
Rich in insight and grounded in practice, this volume is essential reading for policymakers, entrepreneurs, researchers, and students interested in Africa’s development and innovation futures. It is the third in a series produced by the Africa Innovation Summit Foundation and is supported by ICESCO.
This book is a much-needed intervention that finally moves Africa's innovation debate beyond rhetoric. It offers a grounded yet bold agenda that challenges the continent to confront hard truths: our innovation deficit is not a matter of missing strategies — we've had plenty — but of systemic inertia, weak implementation, and fragmented ecosystems. What sets this volume apart is its clear rejection of techno-fixes and donor-led models in favour of a more holistic, indigenous, and context-sensitive innovation paradigm. The contributions highlight the need for innovation not just in laboratories but across our governance systems, educational models, food systems, and development finance. It insists, rightly, that innovation is a societal project — and that the arts, informal sectors, and local knowledge are just as vital as advanced tech. This is a rare example of scholarship that is analytically rigorous, policy-relevant, and unafraid to ask difficult questions. I hope it finds its way into the hands of those willing to drive Africa's transformation with the urgency and imagination it demands.
Olugbenga Adesida is a development policy and foresight specialist, and co-Founder and Director of the Africa Innovation Summit and Bonako (Cabo Verde).
Geci Karuri-Sebina is an Associate Professor at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa and the ICESCO Chair for the Study of Innovation and Futures in Africa.
João Resende-Santos is an Associate Professor of International Studies at Bentley University, Waltham, Massachusetts, USA.
Chapter 1. Transforming Africa: A New Era Driven by Innovation; Olugbenga Adesida, Geci Karuri-Sebina, and Joao Resende-Santos
Chapter 2. Stimulating Innovation in the Food-Health Nexus: An Innovation System Analysis of the Roles of the Critical Stakeholders; Nana Kofi Safo and George Owusu Essegbey
Chapter 3. Putting Community at the Centre of Health System Transformation in Africa; Yap Boum II, Laura Ambe, and Reiche Massengo
Chapter 4. Bringing the Traditional Grains of Sorghum and Millet Back to the Dinner Table; Julius Gatune
Chapter 5. Innovation, Informality And Cultural Heritage: Lessons From a Study of Informal Apparel Businesses in South Africa, Initiates the Section on Sectoral Innovation; Il-haam Petersen
Chapter 6. Exploring Firm-Level Classification of Innovation Behaviour of South African Agricultural Businesses: An Input-Output Modes Approach; Yasser Buchana and Moses Sithole
Chapter 7. Innovation in Under-Resourced Communities Through Art in the Global South; Sean MacGinty and Linda Daniels
Chapter 8. Financing: The Fintech Solution; Tochukwu Egesi
Chapter 9. Transformative Impacts of Ethical and Responsible AI: The Case of AI Sandboxes for Economic Policy Making; Blaise Bayuo and Olamide Goriola
Chapter 10. Countering Violent Extremism in Africa: The Challenges of Navigating Uncertainty; Anthoni van Nieuwkerk
Chapter 11. Harvesting Tomorrow: Revitalising African Foodscapes; Fisayo Oyewale and Shem Omasire
Chapter 12. Reimagining the Future of Higher Education in Africa; Jason Owen, Geci Karuri-Sebina, Riel Miller, and Heide Hackmann
Chapter 13. Transforming Systems Through Innovation: What Must Change in Africa’s Development Agenda; Geci Karuri-Sebina, Joao Resende-Santos, and Olugbenga Adesida